Thursday, 29 November 2012

Whenever I return from a long trip on which I've worked hard, I ponder what life would be like if I didn't rove the globe and live out of a suitcase. Today, during a long conversation with Naturetrek, I jokingly announced I would not be going back to Madagascar. No sooner had I hung up the phone than by email I received this photo, which cruelly preys on my weakness for all things sad-eyed and, especially, for the black-and-white ruffed lemur.

I have been outmanoeuvred this time. Nothing for it, I shall have to go back to Madagascar.

The many jackdaws get up an hour after me, each dropping his sharp call to earth like a dart. There is frost on my car windscreen and the deeply flooded meadow is a scrum of ducks. Two magpies - for joy - row on round wings across a rain dark sky and, coffee in hand, I sit to my laptop to work: mind backwards to Madagascar, mind forwards to Burma, and an eye, always, to the starling scattered sky above my common.

Tuesday, 27 November 2012

A few days ago, on this very blog, I gushed over black-and-white ruffed lemurs. As I stood watching the lemurs in Mantadia, extolling their virtues to my group, my charming Naturetrek colleague Kerrie (who, though an old-Madagascar-hand, had never before seen this most glorious of species) fell for their many charms and became a ready convert to Varecia worship. Kerrie took lots of photos of wildlife, landscape and people during our Madagascar's Lemurs tour and these will appear on the Naturetrek website and blog. She has also kindly allowed me to use them here, for the purposes of marshtittery.

Here then, as a taster of the Malagasy delights to come, is a black-and-white ruffed lemur, just hanging around.

My hairdresser is a lovely young woman with a startling pink streak through her bottle-blonde hair. Emerging scruffily from the forest, I went to see her yesterday.

Hairdresser: Didn't you have all your hair cut off last time you was here?
Marsh tit: Yes, I was travelling again.
Hairdresser: Where was you going?
Marsh tit: I've been in Madagascar for six weeks.
Hairdresser: You're kidding me; I love that film.

This
mammal fauna is exceptional for two major reasons. Firstly, every native
terrestrial species (a total of approximately 148) is endemic, i.e. they occur
naturally nowhere else. No other island or place on Earth boasts such a
combination of species richness and endemism. And secondly, these mammals have
evolved an extraordinary diversity of both forms and lifestyles often
displaying significant convergence with continental forms but also at times
evolving utterly unique features […]. The reason for this is simple: Madagascar has
been an island for a very long time, which has allowed its mammals to evolve
along totally different lines from anywhere else.

Nick Garbutt

Mammals of Madagascar: A
Complete Guide

These
Austronesians, with their Austronesian language and modified Austronesian
culture, were already established on Madagascar by the time it was first
visited by Europeans, in 1550. This strikes me as the single most astonishing
fact of human geography for the entire world. It’s as if Columbus,
on reaching Cuba,
had found it occupied by blue-eyed, blond-haired Scandinavians speaking a
language close to Swedish, even though the nearby North American continent was
inhabited by Native Americans speaking Amerindian languages. How on earth could
prehistoric people of Borneo, presumably voyaging in boats without maps or
compasses, end up in Madagascar?

Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs and Steel – a short
history of everybody for the last 13,000 years

Saturday, 24 November 2012

Unbeknown to me DTH and Gav have been plotting while I've been in Madagascar. They are my oldest birding friends and theirs is a very benign plot, for they've been planning my path to 1,000 birds before the year is out.

I'd agreed before I left that I'd stay with Gav and his girlfriend Amy in London when I got back, in part just to spend time with them and in part to pick up any good birds which could be seen around town. Gav and Amy are both professional singers so I was asked on arrival whether in the evening I'd like to attend ENO's production of Carmen in which Gav is currently performing. Thus it was that after thirty-six hours without sleep, the last music I'd heard being the rainforest wail of of the indri the day before, and dressed in a new style known as just-out-of-the-jungle, I tipped up at the Coliseum to see the show. I had a splendid time and was very grateful for the privilege.

From opera our exploits turned back to birds and early morning today saw us on the beach at Dungeness looking for the site's regular glaucous gull. This trip was smilingly presented to me as a fait accompli, part of DTH and Gav's master-plan for nudging me past the thousand mark. The gulls at Dungeness were good: among the many great black-backs and herrings was a tidy adult yellow-legged and over the sea were an adult kittiwake and a first winter. I love both yellow-legged gulls and kittiwakes, but I've already seen them this year. I also loved the snazzy adult gannets that were over the moody grey water and the many great crested grebes that were on it, but I've seen tons of those this year too. What I hadn't seen was a glaucous gull.

For some time I continued not to see it, until Gav picked up the handsome, hulking ice-winged brute over the fishing boats. From green jery in the Malagasy forest to glaucous gull on a drizzle-damp beach in wintry Kent in two days. What a world this is.

With the gull on the list we sat in the RSPB hides and watched wigeon, goldeneye and kingfisher until cold, wet and hunger harried us back to London. This afternoon I reached my home in Norfolk where, with DTH and Gav's plot to guide me, I hope to see eight more species of bird before December's done.

Thursday, 22 November 2012

On
our last walk in the lovely forest of Analamazaotra my group saw their first
eastern avahis. Three adults, in an exposed huddle on a dead tree, stared at us
with dopey eyes; they even allowed us to coo over their tiny round-faced
infant. Hubbard’s sportive lemur was almost knocked from his popularly-voted
position as cutest lemur seen on the tour.

We
left the forest without having seen any of the last-minute birds I’d hoped we’d
find. I resigned myself to leaving Madagascar on 990 species. A tour leader is
always busy so I was late getting back to my room at Vakona Lodge to pack. As I rushed past a flowering Callistemon I heard
the seven bright chips of a green jery, which I last heard here more than a
year ago. The tiny olive bird was poking his sharp beak into the bristly red flowers above
my head. I stopped to watch and had even less time for packing as a result, but I leave Madagascar on
991 birds for the year. Nine more to find in Norfolk before 2012 is out.

Tonight
we reached Tana and in the wee small hours of tomorrow we’ll leave Madagascar,
courtesy of Air France, bound for Paris and the UK.

The
clouds were telling the truth: our night-walk was rained off, though not before
my group had seen another Crossley’s dwarf lemur and their first short-nosed
chameleon. Given that we’ve also seen short-horned and nose-horned chameleons
on the tour, it’s no surprise I prefer the scientific names.

Tomorrow
morning we visit Analamazaotra for a last walk in the forest; my last walk in a Malagasy forest until who knows when. My last lemurs and my last
chameleons. I love them all, when the rain falls and when the sun shines, and
it has been a blessing to visit them again.

Wednesday, 21 November 2012

The
black-and-white ruffed lemur has always been my favourite of all. It’s rare
(all three subspecies are, tragically, listed as critically endangered by
IUCN); it lives in remote and wonderful forests; it’s acrobatically arboreal,
preferring the tops of mighty rainforest trees; it’s strikingly beautiful, in
pattern and pelage; and it’s hard to see. I love black-and-white ruffed lemurs
and I was secretly very disappointed that we failed to see them on my last tour.

Things
didn’t bode well for our seeing them on this tour either. When my current group
reached Andasibe I asked Naturetrek’s brilliant local guide, Maurice, about the
ruffed lemurs and he replied that they hadn’t been seen by anyone in more than
a week.

Today
we made the long journey to Mantadia’s beautiful primary forest and I whispered
to Maurice and our lemur tracker Marcelin that, having seen indris and diademed
sifakas superbly yesterday, the ruffed lemurs were our main priority here.
Shortly after our arrival, after stops for a pair of white-throated rails and
their night-black chicks, and for a pair of intricately lovely short-legged
ground rollers, we heard the unmistakable snarling calls of the ruffed lemurs
on the ridge above us. We bee-lined up the ridge, naturally, stopping to admire
a placid indri chewing leaves and to let Maurice and Marcelin go ahead to scout
for the lemurs.

Marcelin
found them and called to us across a forest valley. My intrepid Naturetrekkers
took the steep slope, the gnarled roots and the tangled vegetation in their
stride and soon we were watching magnificent black-and-white ruffed lemurs as
they fed on fat fruits at the top of a tall tree. But these were not just any
ruffed lemurs; these were the same parents I saw in October last year and their
four young who were then tiny infants, just learning to scamper through the
treetops. The young are big and strong now and showed their strength and
agility by tumbling down lianas until they were just in front of us and leaping
effortlessly from one tree to the next.

We
were ecstatic and my group agreed with me that these were among the finest of
lemurs. More was to come though, in the shape of two startling Baron’s mantella
frogs, two eastern grey bamboo lemurs, and pairs of Meller’s ducks, Madagascar
little grebes, Madagascar starlings and broad-billed rollers.

Tonight
is my last in Madagascar this year. If the rainclouds don’t defeat us (they did two nights ago but not last night) we’ll
take another walk in the forest in the hope of finding chameleons, dwarf lemurs
and leaf-tailed geckos. For now I’m typing on my rainforest verandah, a crested
drongo singing in the trees above me and a brush warbler weaving through the
undergrowth. I shall greatly miss Madagascar, as I miss every country in which I'm privileged to work, but part of me too will be very glad to be
home. Slavonian grebe (and frost), here I come.

New today

Mammals

129

southern
black-and-white ruffed lemur

Varecia variegata
editorum

Birds

989

white-throated
rail

Dryolimnas cuvieri

990

short-legged
ground-roller

Brachypteracias
leptosomus

Amphibians

23

Baron’s
mantella

Mantella baroni

2012 Totals

Mammals:
129

Birds:
990

Reptiles:
76

Amphibians:
23

Fish:
12

A note for the
linguistically minded: The title of this post is the word used by Maurice, who
has lived all his life in Andasibe, for the black-and-white ruffed lemur. My superb
Naturetrek co-leader Claude, who is from the north of Madagascar and who has
travelled the island’s length and breadth many times, uses the word varikandra which seems to be a more
widespread name for the species. Just thought you’d want to know.

A
conversation today about Lantana and
its colonisation of forests all over the tropics (as we waited for a Madagascar
rail to appear):

Marsh
tit: Tigers in India love to sleep under Lantana and it was all over Mount Lewis when I saw
the blue-faced parrot-finch there.

Charming
birder from Queensland: You’ve seen the
blue-faced parrot-finch?

Marsh tit: Yes.

Charming
birder from Queensland (with a big smile): Bastard.

He,
it would seem, has not.

In
my bathroom at Vakona Lodge in Andasibe there is a large and beautiful male
lined day gecko. In the forest this morning there were singing indris, diademed
sifakas just metres from us (including an adorable youngster born in June), and
a male Henst’s goshawk on a bough. Just twelve birds to go before New Year.

Sunday, 18 November 2012

From
long-tailed ground-roller, subdesert mesite and thamnornis warbler this
morning, in the weighty heat of Ifaty, to a bedgraggled sooty falcon on the
roof of Tana airport in a downpour this evening. Today was a day of travel.

Friday, 16 November 2012

In
Isalo today the Verreaux’s sifakas looped through the trees around us and
cocked their heads to peer at us, strange white primates, with their quizzical yellow
eyes. Their young, born three or four months ago now, are big and strong and
often confident enough to leave their mothers and come pinging through the
forest to investigate the visiting vasas. Nearby a fandrefiala coiled effortlessly
up a liana. This beautiful, near-harmless snake is thought by local people to
stiffen itself and drop like a deadly dart from trees to kill hapless people
and their zebu. All of my group survived the encounter.

A
Benson’s (forest) rock thrush quivered its tail on a boulder in a dry stream,
rosy periwinkles bloomed, a locally endemic frog shone day-glo yellow from a
bright leaf, and, as we left the Canyon des Rats, the low cloud hurled its
thunder and its lightning and its striking rain at us. We trudged through the
heavy clay, pelted by the rain, and smiled big smiles for the lemurs we had
left in the forest and for all the Malagasy creatures we are yet to see. Tomorrow
Zombitse and on to Ifaty.

Thursday, 15 November 2012

Today
we visited the lovely Anja community reserve where infant ring-tailed lemurs
played at our feet, Grandidier’s iguanids toasted themselves on granite
outcrops, and a Madagascarophis colubrinus
snake devoured a hapless Oustalet’s chameleon. This reserve is community
conservation at its best. I hope the model can be replicated elsewhere in
Madagascar. The need is great.

Yesterday’s
long walk in Talatakely was hard work for our clients so, having seen seven
species of lemur in Ranomafana already (in chronological order: golden bamboo,
small-toothed sportive, Milne-Edwards’ sifaka, Peyrieras’ avahi, red-bellied,
red-fronted brown, and brown mouse), this morning we resolved to go in search
of the greater bamboo lemur and, having succeeded or failed, to head for home
and have a restful day. When you set out to see one species of lemur, you see
five, naturally. When we entered the forest our spotter, Bako, had already
found Talatakely’s last two greater bamboo lemurs and, after a good walk, we
saw them astonishingly well. They hopped through the trees just two metres from
us and came down to the ground to feed on fallen bamboo shoots. It was the
encounter of a lifetime; quite literally as Claude had never seen them like
this in fourteen years of visits.

Leaving
the greater bamboos we passed a red-bellied female with indecent haste as we’d
heard that Bako had found the rarely-seen Ranomafana grey bamboo lemur nearby.
(This is a subspecies of the eastern grey bamboo lemur I saw recently in
Andasibe.) We reached the trail to hear that the grey bamboos had been lost,
though we were consoled by a couple of golden bamboos passing by in the tops of
the trees. A call went up: the grey bamboos had been found again, and in
moments we were watching these lovely little animals and comparing them with
the greater bamboos we had been watching at point-blank range just moments
before. The subspecies here seems browner than the eastern grey of
Andasibe-Mantadia and, of course, much slighter than the greater bamboo. It
also lacks the greater’s strong muzzle and big teeth, for tearing into tougher
bamboos, and its diagnostic white ear tufts.

We
were, our guide Berthin told us, the first Naturetrek group, of eight this
season, to see the grey bamboo and thus all three of the park’s bamboo lemurs.
We saw them all within the space of an hour. Jolly chuffed we were too.

On
the way home, well, we stopped to admire a basking tree boa by the
roadside. And in the hotel garden on our return the gardener showed us two
magnificent and very obliging chameleons: a male belted and a female Parson’s. It's a good place, Ranomafana.

This
evening we reached Ranomafana. The five-day rain has stopped for the time being
and the local power cut, which in turn put paid to the water supply, ended just
as we arrived. These I take to be good omens for our stay. Tomorrow we make our
first foray into the forest, where I hope we will have even greater success
than we did on our last tour. This evening, miraculously, I have time to read
the pages of notes I scribbled while in the forest with my two wonderful guides
in Kirindy earlier in the week.

My
guides were Nambina, a young man of twenty from near Antananarivo who had come
to Kirindy to learn to be a professional guide with a view to a career in
tourism, and Doliste, a man in his forties from the nearest village who had lived
all his life in the forest. Nambina belongs to the Merina culture of the
highlands. Doliste identifies himself as Tetsaka but broadly belongs to the
Sakalava culture of the west; he has had very little school education, and
speaks little French (why should he?) but he knows the chip of every bird, the
quiver of every leaf and the chirp of each insect. He also breaks readily into
a big smile, especially when it occurs to a scrawny westerner to act out the
foraging behaviour of a buttonquail.

I
like language, I like wildlife and I like people; so wherever I go I jot local
names for animals and plants. The following list, for many reasons, doubtless
contains numerous errors. I speak no Malagasy, one of my guides and I had no language in common, and the other was a newcomer from another
culture. Some of the names I cite below may be wrong, others may be locally
inappropriate, still others may apply in only a small area of west Madagascar
and, let’s face it, I may have got the wrong end of the stick. Nonetheless,
here are some names I was given for plants and animals which my guides and I
saw (or in some cases heard) together in the forest.

Malagasy or
regional dialect name

English or
scientific name

fitatsy

magpie
robin

tsararako

broad-billed
roller

fony

baobab
(in this case Adansonia rubrostipa)

reniala

baobab

fihiaky

harrier
hawk

ray
lovy

drongo

toloho

coucal

reo
reo (meaning: two two)

cuckoo
roller (an onomatopoeic rendition of its song)

sianga,
voromanga

souimanga
sunbird (the latter name may also be used colloquially to mean a pretty girl)

About Me

This is a blog about wildlife. It is also a blog about the way human beings relate to wildlife: how we perceive it, how we portray it in pictures and words, how we treat it, and what it means to us. Equally, it is, in no small measure, a blog about the way we relate to one another.
My name is Nick. I am a naturalist and wildlife conservationist. Native to Norfolk, and home here again, I have been privileged to live and work all over the world.
It shouldn’t take much to realise that I neither have, nor claim, any affiliation with cheap car insurance, nor with meerkats. This blog’s name is a simple play on words, in homage to a piece of advertising genius.
Simples.
Now, about that wildlife…